BOW
Stephanie Deady, Sarah O’Brien, Richard Proffitt, Fionna Murray
BOW follows the threads of places and meaning. Looking at what we make, find, and collect, and how these point to memories and interests. The simple daily measures that please us, such as parks, books, art, and dreams.
The works allude to images of deep familiarity, a friend’s rented flat, bathed in harsh overhead lights, a home but not home.
The curve of discarded plywood, weathered and repurposed for art, yet still inhabits the city’s surface. And ghost references to beloved childhood books. The exhibition builds its meaning in repair, assemblages, layers, collages, and little vignettes.
The bow is a descriptor of many things. A holder of several meanings: a tie, a bind, a knot, and a restrainer.
It is a deferential greeting, a cupid's lip, an accessory, a beautifier, a package, and a gift. The bow is tensioned strings, an activator, the holder of energy, and an arc of seven colours. The bow is a binding, it can be simple and urbane, innocent and alluring, ubiquitous and ambiguous.
Limerick City Gallery of Art Link
Fionna Murray, Sarah O’Brien, Richard Proffitt, Stephanie Deady
Fionna Murray
.Murray’s practice engages with themes around memory and displacement and the experience of shifting sequences of lived time and places. She uses loosely connected images to create fragmentary worlds that are often concerned with boundaries and an ordering of forms within and across urban and rural thresholds. Murray is interested in the matter of paint in and of itself, how it communicates and works to create mute spaces of pause and potential, whilst pursuing a feeling of ambiguity where moments of familiarity are charged with uncertainty. The paintings and drawings suppose more than explain becoming speculative places of transition in a negotiation between the materials and questions of reality and fiction.
Born in London, Fionna Murray studied at Chelsea College of Art (UAL), gaining a BA Honours in Painting. She moved to Ireland and studied for an MFA at the University of Ulster, Belfast in 1997. She has exhibited nationally and internationally with work being represented in public and private collections in Ireland and abroad, including: The OPW State Collection; The Centre Cultural Irlandais; The University of Galway; The University of the Arts, London; Ballinglen Arts Foundation.
Richard Proffitt
Richard Proffitt, born Liverpool, UK, 1985, is an artist based in Dublin, Ireland.
Richard Proffitt’s work in painting, sculpture, video, and sound is characterised by its manipulation and repurposing of found material, recurring themes, coded motifs, and symbolism. These works often combine to create installations that evoke previously inhabited and later abandoned places of worship; environments suggestive of the intermingling universes of esoteric religions, the bedrooms of teenage loners, and the remote dwellings of psychedelic cults.
He has exhibited both nationally and internationally and recent exhibitions include Shadow The Solar Trail, VISUAL, Carlow, 2023, A Memory Circular, Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin, 2021, EVA International, Limerick City, 2021, May the moon rise and the sun set, UCC/Glucksman, Cork, 2019 & Display, Link & Cure, The Complex, Dublin, 2019.
He studied Fine Art (MA) at Manchester School of Art, 2007-08, and Visual Arts (BA) at University of Salford, 2004-2007.
Sarah O’Brien
O’Brien’s paintings are a site of mending/reparation, exploring painting’s kindredness with remedy, alchemy; its rootedness in the ancient and resonance with themes of healing are the core of her current studio research and practice. Her paintings are densely layered over the course of their production, taking on a sculptural form with glues and papier mâché. As such embedded in the paintings is the arc of their making. The paintings are markers of time, time as material. The scale of the recent paintings offers a grand space to sustain words and collaged elements, (partial, reversed, upside down); to be read as active or incidental communication, decorative elements or inscrutable glyphs. The painting as a healing practice is physically manifested in the layering of canvas strips, like gauze, then mended or bound with paint. The paintings take on a near corporeal vibration. The painting as an energetic imprint of the author, echoing Isabelle Graw’s essay The Value of Liveliness talks of painting ‘..to be experienced in their physicality as a manifestation of the absent author’ Painting beyond Itself The Medium in the Post-medium Condition.
Stephanie Deady
Deady has received critical acclaim and exhibited in Dublin, Italy, and Kilkenny. She was awarded the prestigious Tony O’Malley Residency and was awarded the Hennessy Craig Award 2024. Her work is in the OPW State Art Collection and in private collections in Ireland and the UK. Upcoming exhibitions include ABSTRACT PAINTING Kevin Kavanagh (2025), solo exhibition at Kevin Kavanagh Dublin (2025). Previous group and solo exhibitions include Magic and Loss, Kevin Kavanagh (2025), Measure for Measure, Art House Laois (2024), Hennessy Craig, Ryan Gallery RHA, (2024), ANSEO, Ballinglen First Biennial (2023), Boyle Arts Festival (2023), RHA Annual Exhibition, Dublin (2023), Measure for Measure, Solo Exhibition, Kevin Kavanagh Dublin (2022), The Pleasure Ground, Rathfarham Castle (2022), SILVER, Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin (2019), Hennessy Craig Award, Shortlisted Group Show, RHA Dublin (2019), Make Haste Slowly, Goeth-Institut Ireland, Dublin (2018), Island Life, Kevin Kavanagh Dublin (2018), Primed Vision, Solo Exhibition, Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin (2018), An Act of Hospitality can only be Poetic, Highlanes Gallery Drogheda curated by Linda Shevlin and Aoife Ruane (2018), She was the recipient of the Hennessy Craig 2024. Recipient of the Claremorris Gallery Award, Ballinglen First Biennial (2023).
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BOW: Stephanie Deady, Fionna Murray, Sarah O’Brien, Richard Proffitt April 2025. Sarah Searson was invited to curate BOW at the city galleries. The exhibition is a celebration of the individual pursuit of ideas. The exhibition is interested in how art resonates, soothes, and chimes with our common experience of life and living.
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Images are credited to Limerick City Gallery of Art and Paul McCarthy